


Love and the Malichor

by Merileigh



Series: Bound [3]
Category: GreedFall (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Hints of Vasco/De Sardet, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:47:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23143408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merileigh/pseuds/Merileigh
Summary: He had accepted that he was going to die. The weight of the words, the inevitability of them, settled on me and stopped my breath. I wanted to argue. But for a moment after he’d spoken, I had to face the thought that he would die, leaving me with… I couldn’t think what I might do if Constantin was gone. We had always been in this together.
Relationships: Constantin d'Orsay/De Sardet, Kurt & De Sardet (GreedFall)
Series: Bound [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1619806
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	1. Bad Blood, part I

**Author's Note:**

> Bad Blood parts I and II cover in-game events. Most of the dialogue is taken or adapted from the game. Bear with me while we replay a few things!
> 
> Major spoilers ahead for the Very Bad Day involving Kurt and De Sardet's back story.
> 
> Lyrics are from "Hunger" by Florence + The Machine.

__

_Oh and you in all your vibrant youth,  
How could anything bad ever happen to you?  
You make a fool of death with your beauty,  
And for a moment I forget  
To worry._

“Cousin! You couldn’t pick a better time! I’ve been taken with jitters, like a cat on a midday roof!”

I was covered in dust from the road and weary, not from travel but with the story I’d just heard from the admiral, but I still smiled at the way he greeted me, spreading his arms wide, his heel bouncing on the dais like he might jump out of his chair. For a moment, at least, I could let Constantin make me forget.

“What are you waiting for with such anticipation?” I asked, teasing. After the morning I’d had, I was happy to be caught up in whatever distraction he’d found for himself.

"I took your advice, you see?” he said, leaning forward. He looked toward the window and for the first time I noticed the doctor dressed in drab brown and gray standing there in the sunlight that spilled across the floor. “I’ve summoned one of these _CROWS_.” He bellowed the last word. The man did not seem to hear.

“He has been examining me for nearly an hour,” Constantin continued. He sat back in his chair. “I just barely escaped a purge. But I was given the mandatory bleeding—I so hate their little knives…” His voice gave the tale all the drama of a theatrical production, but knowing how he mistrusted doctors, I could imagine that it had been a fairly dramatic examination. If Constantin was bellowing at the man now, what had he said when the doctor had stuck him with a knife in the crook of his arm and bled him into a bowl?

If Constantin had ruffled the crow’s feathers, I would have to be ready to smooth things over later. “So then, our venerable doctor,” I said, trying for a respectful tone, but it was hard to swallow my smile. “What is the verdict?”

The doctor did not speak but held the vial he had been examining up in front of the window where it caught the light.

My eyes knew the truth before my mind could accept it. The blood was black, like a stain on the glass. Infected. “It’s…the blood is black.” I said it hoping that I was wrong, that the doctor would say something to contradict what was plain to my sight.

Constantin in that moment had a look on his face like a man condemned, and I felt my heart stuttering when I saw it. Three steps, and I was kneeling in front of his chair. I took hold of his arm and tried to make him look at me, but his eyes were blind and staring. “Constantin—is this your blood? Constantin, answer me!” And then I was speaking more to drown my own panic. I couldn’t lose Constantin, too. “Constantin! Stay with me, Constantin! –There is a chance he is in error; it might be something else—”

He pushed me off, pushed himself away from me. “I’m going to die.”

“No! No, Constantin.” I felt like I barely had breath to speak the words, but I would deny it until I had no breath left at all.

He stood and walked past me, weaving a little on his feet. “I will die,” he said, his breath hitching, “like your mother and the others on the continent.” His hands came up to grasp at the empty air. “I—I am dying.”

I watched him wavering on the edge, his voice high and thin, while I struggled even to think in the face of this thing that couldn’t be. It couldn’t be true. I hadn’t seen any trace of the malichor since we’d landed on Teer Fradee. “I—I don’t want to die! I don’t! No—not so soon. It’s so…

“C-Cousin—” He turned, and it was the look on his face that told me what I needed to do. I went to him and wrapped my arms around him even when he tried to push me away again.

“Constantin, I’m here,” I said firmly in his ear. I could feel him shaking. “Pull yourself together.” The Coin Guards stationed around the room had averted their eyes as the governor very publicly fell apart, most of them; there were others who were stealthily watching under their helmets, to take the story to their comrades in the tavern later, I thought. “Out!” I said. Anger was useful; it gave me energy where the malichor had drained it, clarity, where the malichor had left me in a blind fog. “Everyone out! –It’s an order!”

I held him until the doors shut behind the last of them. A moment later, I felt him take a shuddering breath, and he straightened, his eyes focusing on mine. “Thank you, Cousin,” he said. The panic had left his voice, but bleakness had taken its place.

Because I couldn’t hear that from him, couldn’t let myself feel that, I pretended confidence when I spoke. “There now,” I said, grasping his arms to try to buoy him up, “are you better?”

“I don’t know. –You won’t leave me, will you?”

“I’m going to find a cure,” I answered. “I promise you.”

He looked away, shaking his head in a half-hearted way, and walked past me, back toward his seat. “Didn’t you promise the same thing to your mother?” he said. “You know I’ll be dead before you find one.”

He was being cruel to get me to stay. I knew it, but still there was too much truth in the words. I had a direction to go in to seek answers, nothing more than that. Not a plant, not a spell for a cure—even the source of the malichor was still a mystery. Constantin might have weeks or months, and my hands were empty. But I would leave him for hope. I couldn’t stay and watch him die, when there was something I might do to prevent it.

“Don’t say that.” I was talking to his back as he stood facing away from me. “I will succeed. I’ve already some promising trails to explore.” If I could convince us both, I might give him more time. I needed him to fight, and he thought he’d lost already.

“I don’t know, Cousin,” he said, turning to face me. In the low light in the middle of the receiving hall, the dark shadows under his eyes and the telltale black flush beneath his fair skin stood out. “The tidings are so awfully dire… I’m afraid.” He took in a ragged breath. “S-so afraid.” But he fought to master himself and reached out to take my shoulders, patting me, a gesture he couldn’t put feeling behind.

“I doubt the reason for your visit was to console me in my tragedy,” he continued, his voice trembling only a little. “Tell me, what brings you here?”

“It can wait,” I said. “It’s nothing that cannot be dealt with later.”

He shook his head. “But please… Please. Whatever it is it will take my mind elsewhere.”

Constantin. He didn’t know what he was asking. Now I was the one who felt the need to avoid his gaze. I looked away, down at the floor as I spoke. “I was able to get the whole story out of the admiral in exchange for a service,” I said. I told him all of it, the Congregation’s attempt to colonize the island by force, and their defeat—so shameful for the princes that they had hid the truth of it for generations.

“That they hid the fiasco from the world I get,” Constantin said, shaken like I was by the revelation. “But that my father said nothing about it to me…”

I crossed my arms over my chest. The next part would be harder to tell. “That’s not the most shocking part of the story, believe me.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Congregation continued to make expeditions to the island with the help of the Nauts,” I said. “According to the admiral”—I hesitated. Speaking it aloud to Constantin would make it real it a way that I still wasn’t ready to accept. We would both know that our childhood growing up together had been a lie. But I also couldn’t keep this from him and continue to pretend that my resemblance to the islanders wasn’t anything more than an eerie coincidence. “My mother was captured from here during one of them. I was born on one of their ships.”

“What?” he breathed. “But… That means you are not…”

“Your fair cousin? No.” I sighed. Speaking the words I felt the shock again of learning that all my life had been the result of violence and buried secrets—a raid, my mother’s captivity. What had happened to my mother? And why had the prince taken me into his family? “All the lies that we’ve been fed since our tender childhood. –The fable told that I’m the spitting image of my dead father, lost during an expedition. I—I don’t know what to think, Constantin. Why did they do that to me?”

“I don’t know. It’s another one of their sly and dark orchestrations…some vile intrigue.”

He closed the distance between us and took me by my shoulders again, and our eyes met. “If it is of some comfort,” he continued, his voice gaining strength, “No matter the true story, you will always be my fair cousin. You have always been the only one to care for me. You are my only friend; that’s all that matters to me.” I hadn’t truly thought that Constantin would reject me when he found out that we weren’t related by blood, but I hadn’t realized before then how much I needed to hear him say it. He and I had been bound together as family, through hundreds of moments during our childhood, in a way that he and his parents never had been. His closest blood relations treated him so often like a pawn to move around the board. And now we knew that I had been a pawn, too.

“Keep this discovery between us. No one needs to know. My aunt adopted you, after all.

“Bring in the others,” he added, putting an end to the conversation, letting go of me. “Let us speak of different concerns. That’s enough bad news for one day.”

But I had only taken a step to go to the door when I heard him take two steps to follow, and he grabbed my hand. I turned to face him. “But stay the afternoon, at least,” he insisted. “I hardly see you.”

There we were, caught in the middle of the empty receiving hall with people waiting outside for the governor and the legate. All I wanted was to find an empty room for us to closet ourselves up inside. We could steal a bottle of wine and some meat and bread from the kitchen and send the whole palace into a tumult trying to find us while we rewrote our history and avoided thinking about the future. By the bottom of the bottle, we might be laughing.

If I’d known what was coming, I might have pulled him through the door that led to the stairway up to the third floor, into the maze of rooms and corridors until we were lost. But I was already thinking about the next trail I planned to follow in my search for a cure, to find the _tierna harh cadachtas_ , who was rumored to have created a potion that could heal any affliction, a panacea. I hadn’t believed it when a charlatan selling potions in the streets of Sérène had claimed the same thing, but the island clans had knowledge that we didn’t. The _tierna harh_ surely knew healing arts that were beyond our own.

“I will, Constantin,” I promised. “And I’ll return as soon as I can.”

I watched him until he’d climbed the steps of the dais and settled into his seat, his expression distracted and distant but calmer, and then I went to the door. The two guards stationed there had kept the small crowd that had gathered back on the landing, among them four of my traveling companions. I had asked Vasco and Siora to go back to house while I spoke with Constantin alone, and they looked better for the opportunity to rest and change out of their traveling clothes. Aphra and Petrus must have come with them from the house. But I was surprised that Kurt wasn’t here. I had thought he would have settled whatever business at the barracks had kept him from traveling with us to San Matheus.

“Our private business is finished,” I said to the guards at the door to let them know that Constantin was receiving again. Later I would have a word with the guards who had been in the hall to see if I could convince them to keep their silence. If l couldn’t appeal to their loyalty to a client who paid them well, then perhaps they would understand the need to avoid spreading rumors that the malichor had come to Teer Fradee and starting a panic.

I could almost hear the questions they were thinking as my companions came in, sending sideways glances toward me. It was Petrus who finally spoke. “What is the matter, my child?”

I looked meaningfully toward the others who were coming through the door, Coin Guards going back to their posts and members of the Congregation here to see Constantin on their own business. Petrus and the others followed me toward the row of tall windows that let in the late afternoon sunlight, and we stood there in our own quiet knot while the room came to life again around us.

“I can’t say much here,” I told them. “Except that I’ll need to leave again tomorrow morning. We have to find the _tierna harh cadachtas_ as soon as we can.” I caught Aphra raising her brows. She glanced at Constantin and then back to find me looking at her.

“We saw the doctor leaving as we arrived,” she said, and I nodded, affirming her suspicions. “But I don’t understand,” she continued, “how—”

“She has all but asked us for our discretion,” Petrus interrupted, more offended than he needed to be on my behalf as he looked down at Aphra.

“Father,” I said with a note of reproach, and thankfully that seemed to be enough to remind him that there was no war here in New Sérène, or anywhere while they traveled with me. He subsided, inclining his head to me. “I’ll tell you the rest tonight, back at the house,” I told them all.

“If it’s still standing,” I added, turning a questioning look on Petrus, who had grace enough to chuckle.

“We were as quiet as church mice in our own corners while you were away, my child.”

I smiled wryly at that. I could imagine the house had been deathly quiet while we’d been gone. If Kurt had decided to stay at the barracks to avoid being caught in a battle of silence, I wouldn’t blame him.

“If you have any books on the geography of Teer Fradee here, I could start drawing a map of the inland forests,” Aphra offered, carefully avoiding even glancing at Petrus. “Siora, would you help me?” Since she had joined our party, Aphra had been making overtures of friendship to Siora—sometimes too directly. Siora never hesitated to express her skepticism of the lioness, even to her face. I was grateful to all of my companions for lending their talents to the pursuits that had me traveling from one end of the island to the other, and for their company, but we were far from a band of friends.

But now Siora looked curious. “You know how to make a map? –This is like the drawings you make while we are traveling?” she added, looking at me.

“Yes,” I answered. “A drawing of the land that travelers use to find their way. I suspect Aphra is more skilled at drawing them than I am.

“Sir de Courcillon keeps the books that we’ve collected on Teer Fradee there,” I added to Aphra, nodding toward the shelves that lined the opposite wall of the receiving hall. “If we have anything describing the more inland areas, it will be on those shelves.” With a glint in her eye at the prospect of a good challenge, Aphra left us and, with a last glance at me, Siora followed.

Vasco, watching them go, laughed low in his throat, and when he turned back to face me, our eyes met. “A pair of keen minds,” he said. “I would hate to stand between Aphra and the answer to a question.”

The air between us had been full of tension on the way back from San Matheus, where I’d had to reveal the Nauts’ closely-guarded secrets to the Mother Cardinal to save the lives of all of their sailors in port. I was relieved to hear Vasco sounding so lighthearted now. I might be able to hope that we could come back from the things we’d said to each other. “I wouldn’t put money on your odds if you did,” I replied, smiling.

It was the most free we’d been with each other that day, and he glanced away as if considering something before he looked back at me. “I owe you an apology, De Sardet,” he said, more quietly. Beside me, Petrus was suddenly inspired to look out the window and moved away from us a couple steps. “I let my poetic impulses run away with me.”

“I’d rather have your friendship than an apology, Vasco."

***

The first night we’d arrived at the house I’d taken in San Matheus, I’d found him alone in the sitting room, lingering over the books on their shelves after Siora and I had gone in for dinner. He’d had a book in one hand, his index finger keeping his place in the pages, while he looked absently at the rest of the library.

“You’ll miss dinner,” I warned him. “And I can’t promise there will be a scrap of food left, as hungry as I am.” I turned to leave, but he called me back. He had the book open.

“Do you know this one?” he asked. He put the book in my hand and tapped one long finger on the left-hand page.

“Love and the sea…” I said, reading the title aloud. “I think I may have read it before.” I read the lines now, feeling Vasco’s eyes on me, and then he started to recite the words, his voice only a rough murmur.

“Sea and love both share a bitter bite. The sea seizes, and love seizes... Love scalds us and the sea scalds us, for neither are free from tempest’s might…”

There was no mistaking his meaning. The words were in front of me, and his voice was coaxing out a craving that I couldn’t indulge. It was so hard for me to look up at him, knowing what I had to say. Vasco’s loyalties were to the Nauts. He had risked his life only days ago to prove that. I couldn’t put a claim on him, when our other loves and obligations might put us at odds in the future. I wouldn’t invite politics into my bed, not again.

But when the thought of saying yes made me shiver in my skin—ah, it was hard to choose loyalty.

“I was trying to remember it,” he said when I looked up. “It makes me think of you—of us.

“I—,” he started. He hesitated for so long that I thought he might leave whatever else he was thinking unsaid, but then he seemed to make up his mind. “Would you like to spend some time alone with me?”

I closed the book, gave it back to him. “…I am flattered, Vasco,” I said, as gently as I could. I met his eyes because he deserved that much, even though I was afraid he would see how I was torn. “I value your friendship. And I want to keep it. I don’t think it’s wise for us to…risk that for anything more.”

“Ah.” He looked away. His knuckles were white as his fingers clenched around the book. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have—” He moved away to put the book back on the shelf, and when he turned back to me, he didn’t quite meet my eyes. “Please, forget I said anything.”

He went around me to leave the room, and when he reached the hall, he turned to go to the front door. “Don’t wait for me,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

The next day he had stood by while I put on a navigator’s coat and rummaged through the Nauts’ storerooms, turning up secrets, and then while I had given those secrets to the Mother Cardinal in exchange for her intervention. If he had left me as soon as we returned to the port in New Sérène, he would have had reason. By the time we’d reached the city, I had expected it; he’d been nearly silent on the journey back. But I could tell that something had changed for him after we had spoken with the admiral. Perhaps it was that I had changed. A child born on a ship at sea, I should have been a Naut—was that why he stayed?

***

“You have that, my friend,” Vasco said now, standing across from me in the receiving hall. “I spoke harshly to you after San Matheus, and I regret it. You’ve given me—all of us—some things to think about.”

“Have you decided to stay?” I asked him. “For now?”

“For now. We aren’t saying goodbye yet, De Sardet.”

I smiled at his tone, chiding, a milder echo of some of his first words to me, when he’d corrected the insult I’d given to his ship. “I’m glad to hear it, Vasco.”


	2. Bad Blood, part II

I went to stand by Constantin to spend what little time I could with him and to spare him some of the burden of being diplomatic. We didn’t speak much in between audiences; there were too many people in the room. But one of the last petitioners in the line said something that made me think of a joke we’d had between us a long time ago, about nobles and their sensitivity and the chafing that must no doubt result, and after the woman had turned to leave the hall, I looked over and found him already watching me sidelong. I turned my back on the hall for a moment so I could grimace at him without anyone else seeing, a copy of the face he’d used to make to imitate a chronically chafed noble. He laughed under his breath.

The door opened. I heard behind me the sound of booted feet crossing the floor and the quiet ring of metal on metal. Constantin looked across the hall, and his brow furrowed. I turned to see Kurt standing too far away from us, at attention. He had taken off our colors and wore a plain brown brigandine.

“Kurt, what is…?” Constantin trailed off. Kurt was looking past us, and I began to feel as though the floor was dropping out from under me. Constantin’s voice was uncertain when he asked, “What’s going on? Is there something wrong?”

“Coin Guards!” At Kurt’s command, more guards filed into the hall, and as they jogged to take their places in a line to either side of him, the guards that had been in the room with us the entire afternoon acted. Vasco cried out and fell to his knees as one of them struck him in the back of the head; Siora and the others were being held at rifle point. Constantin was speaking, but I didn’t hear what he said. I was looking at the guns that were now aimed at us—the rifles that I had seen in a crate in the harbor warehouse after our voyage. The Coin Guard had used me to orchestrate this. I had put those guns into their hands, all unwittingly.

Kurt wouldn’t look at me as he relentlessly gave his orders. Behind me, Constantin was on his feet. “Stop that, soldiers! Lower your weapons! Now!” But his voice wavered; he must already have known that he had no control. Kurt was in command, and he had betrayed us.

“Sorry, Green Blood.”

I had gone cold with anger when I stepped forward to put myself between Constantin and the row of guards. It gave me strength that I might not have had otherwise. “Fight with honor,” I reminded Kurt, the words he had spoken to us nearly every day for years. They were bitter in my mouth. But they were the only weapon I had that would reach him before his soldiers could kill me.

Kurt looked down at the floor at my feet, nodding his head like a man who has been forced to a conclusion. Then he closed his fist. His soldiers looked askance at him, but they raised their weapons and stepped back.

He drew his great sword and held it back over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. “On guard,” he said, harshly. Then, when I hesitated—“I said draw!”

I drew my yataghan. I should have drawn my pistol. Kurt was taller and heavier than I was; his weapon had a much longer reach. We both knew I was outmatched. But something in his face stopped me from trying to kill him outright. I wanted to know why he had done this—if I lived long enough to demand answers.

I was distantly aware that some of the soldiers had forced Vasco and my other companions back onto the dais with Constantin. I could feel their eyes on me as I took a step forward and found my stance, as though this were another day in the courtyard and Kurt would send me to get water and pick apart my mistakes when we were through. My heart was beating so hard I thought it would shake the rest of me.

I dodged his first rush, rolling out of the way under his blade. I came up on one knee, then got to my feet, trembling. He would expect it, if I tried that again. And if I was going to land a blow, I would have to get closer.

Kurt turned and lunged toward me, swinging his blade in an arc that would take it slanting across my chest. This time I stepped toward him and pivoted, holding my yataghan to deflect the blow long enough to get me past his guard, and while he was recovering from his swing, I brought the blade down across his thigh. His breath hissed out of him, and he staggered back from me. Blood was soaking the fabric of his breeches along the tear I had made.

The room was silent except for our panting breaths. He met my eyes, I thought by accident. But before I could think of anything to say, anything that might convince him to stop, he had raised his sword again. His face was closed off from me.

When he swung, I stepped back and then closed the distance between us after his blade swept past me—but he was expecting it and his elbow and the base of his blade came back and knocked me aside. Only my gauntlet saved me from taking that blow in my ribs. I had to take several steps to keep from falling, and by the time I had gathered myself, he was coming for me again.

It was his voice I heard in my mind when I parried clumsily and he forced me back toward a corner of the room. _Try to use force against a larger and stronger opponent, and he’ll have you. Regroup._ I dodged another sweeping blow and then rushed him when his sword was at the end of its arc, and my yataghan flashed toward his exposed shoulder, and he had to let the momentum of his swing carry him out of my path. I won the center of the room and turned again to face him. He had to attack before he’d gathered himself. I ducked and came up past his guard, and I struck him in the jaw with my gauntleted fist.

It shouldn’t have worked. We were both surprised when it did. He gasped and lurched away, showing me his back, and I followed.

“Stop it, Kurt!” I caught him by his collar, pulled him backward, and held my blade to his throat. His sword fell heavily on the floor.

“Wait!”

“Speak!” I demanded. “Why did you betray us?”

Even now he wouldn’t look at me but stared up at the ceiling. “Our commander figured out that we could easily take control of this island,” he said, his voice rough and rasping. “You rely so heavily on our protection. You are so dependent…so naïve. All the governors will suffer the same attacks if they haven’t already.” I took in a shallow breath at this news, but he didn’t fight me or try to break my grip on him. He kept talking. “Your problems are far from over, Green Blood. The commander is there on the docks with all his lieutenants. I failed. But they will certainly succeed, here or elsewhere on the island…”

He took a ragged breath, and now he sounded almost like he wanted to laugh. “Not every governor has a cousin that I trained personally for combat.”

He had just told me that we had no time, but still I hesitated.

“It’s over,” I told him. “You are defeated.” I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t draw my blade across his throat. I had vague thoughts of convincing Constantin to spare him a traitor’s death.

I felt his hand on my pistol an instant before he pulled it from my belt, and his elbow came up to land a blow on my cheekbone. I staggered away from him, and my hand came up to my cheek. The pain radiated through me but worse was the knowledge that I was dead—and Constantin with me. Because I had been a fool. I knew it before I turned back to face Kurt. He held the pistol pointed at my head. “You have no honor,” I said, condemning him with the words. I stared him in the face. If he was going to kill me now, he would damn well look me in the eyes.

“I agree with you,” he said. His voice sounded hollow in a way I’d never heard it before. “But I did train you well, at least there’s that.”

I was too angry to hear it. “The student surpasses the master, and you cannot bear it,” I said, taking several steps toward him and the gun he held. I would hurt him in whatever way I could in the moments I had left.

“You are wrong. I am proud of you.” He was breathing heavily.

What was he saying?

“Truly.”

I was still furious with him when he put my pistol under his chin and pulled the trigger.

I was reaching for him—to do what, I don’t know—when he fell. But Kurt had done what I couldn’t and taken his own life. His throat was a ruin, his blood spreading across the floor, and when I looked at his face, the sight hit me like something physical, a blow that felt as though it might break me.

The men he had commanded still stood in front of me. Several had taken uncertain steps back, and they held their guns haphazardly. Without Kurt standing in front of them, they looked even younger than I was. They were practically raw recruits. I don’t know what they saw in my face, but it was enough to make them throw the rifles down at their feet and back away.

"Thank you… You saved us all.” Constantin’s voice pulled me back, and I turned to find him looking at me, solemn and tired. He sighed. “The nerve of them.”

I had one last scrap of anger that hadn’t been blown away by horror and confusion, and I held onto it like it was the most dear thing I owned. “What else was there to expect from employing coin-fed mercenaries. All that liberty, so close to power, went to their heads.”

Constantin sat heavily on his throne. His face was a mirror of the sapping disorientation that I felt. Our world had turned over more times in one day than anyone could have been prepared for. “It would have happened sooner or later,” I continued, coming closer until he looked up at me. “They could have been preparing this sort of coup for years.”

“Without wanting to rush you,” Vasco broke in, “bantering about the dangers of according one’s trust to a sell-sword is appropriate, but…”

“You’re right. It’s time for action. We need to get you somewhere safe, Constantin.”

“Those are my advisors you must protect,” Constantin replied. I couldn’t interpret the look he was giving me. “Me, I want to—”.

“To join in?” I interrupted. “Look at your condition! It’s out of the question. We are taking you somewhere safe.” He wouldn’t like it, but I wouldn’t risk him. It was my duty and more than that. I hoped that would be enough to convince him.

I was thankful when he did not fight me then and there. “Since you’ve left me no choice,” he said, “there’s a hiding place in the cellar.”

“We will take care of your advisors after that.”

“And we should make these conger eels pay for their treachery,” Vasco added, full of contempt.

“And attempt to stop the coups in other cities.” That was Petrus, already two steps ahead of us.

“Then we have no time to lose.” I held my hand out to Constantin, and he let me help him up, even though he didn’t need it. It was all the apology I could give him for hustling him about like a child.

I had reached for my pistol before I remembered where it was, lying on the floor by Kurt’s hand. The others were checking weapons, preparing themselves, while I went to kneel by Kurt’s side. It was impossible not to look at him, but when I did, I felt all my resolve slipping away like I was trying to hold a shadow in my hands. I took a deep breath that was sharp with the smell of blood when I opened the cylinder to load a new round, but even that didn’t keep my fingers steady.

“Kurt’s death may have been enough to make these congers retreat, but they’ll come back, that’s for sure. We’d better be prepared for a fight.” Vasco knelt beside me, his own pistol already in his hand. When I looked up at him, he put a bracing hand on my shoulder. “Are you ready, De Sardet?”

I nodded—a lie. “Yes.”—another lie. But I knew the motions. Kurt had made sure of that. He had drilled me every morning so that I could fight even when my heart was shrinking from it. I got to my feet and looked at the others, who were standing ready. Constantin stood a little apart, watching me in a way that made me straighten my shoulders. That was concern on his face. I didn’t want him worrying over me when he was the one who was suffering. “Let’s be gone,” I said. I met his eyes. “Stay behind us, Constantin. You’re in no condition to fight. We must hurry before the Guard can act.”

We had to fight our way to the cellar and then to the offices of Sir de Courcillon and Minister Fabron. If Kurt had killed us outright instead of listening to me, the Coin Guard would have been able to take New Sérène with hardly any resistance. They had made their plans well.

With Sir de Courcillon and the minister safe, we all crowded together around the table in the cellar room. There would be more soldiers holding the streets between the governor’s palace and the docks. Even now word might have reached the commander that Kurt had failed; we might be too late to stop him. And then there was the matter of aiding our allies. Both Petrus and Aphra had asked for my help as we cobbled our plans together in the dark little room, and now they were waiting on a reply.

Constantin and I shared a glance over the table. “Hikmet,” he said finally. “Go to Hikmet once New Sérène is safe.” When Petrus began to protest, Constantin held up a hand to stop him. “My cousin can only be in one place at a time,” he said. “Father, by all means, go to help your governor. The Mother Cardinal can retreat to that village you share with the natives, if there’s the need. Or bring her here. We will shelter her.”

“Father, we will see you safely out of the city,” I said.

Once Petrus had agreed, there was nothing else that needed to be said. It was past time for us to be gone. How long had it been since I’d thought of running away with Constantin from our problems for the afternoon, not even an hour? And now I had no choice but to say goodbye to him with an audience. “Constantin,” I said as the others were beginning to leave the room, “promise me that you will stay here until we secure the city.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked away from me. “Do I even have a choice?” he asked. “Here I am consigned to my quarters like some broken old maid…”

“Like someone ill, Constantin,” I replied, gently, because I knew what it cost him to have to stay and wait for word. “Someone sick who is dear to me. And the city wouldn’t survive your loss.”

He unbent a little. “You have such a way with words,” he said under his breath. But he wouldn’t meet my eyes when he continued, “Very well. I promise to stay here, obediently awaiting your return.”

“Let’s go then.” I put on a smile for him and the others in the room, so they wouldn’t see how it hurt me to leave. I wouldn’t see Constantin again for days, or weeks. And perhaps never again. These weren’t highway robbers we’d be facing, but soldiers who had been training for this day since they were children. They had endured far more than the Prince d’Orsay’s coddled niece to earn their skills.

Of course, Constantin knew that as well as I did. “And Cousin,” he added before I could leave, in spite of the fact that we weren’t alone, “watch out for yourself. ...You are dear to me as well.”

For the first time I felt what it cost to leave. I was quiet, we all were, when we left the palace for glaring sunshine and the dangers that might be waiting for us around any corner. My thoughts were occupied with estimating the rounds I had in the pouch at my belt and the potions in the bag that waited by the door of my house, the habits of traveling in the wilderness that had become familiar to me. I kept those thoughts front of mind—and as for the rest, I only let myself think that I would see Constantin again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We are going to need a lot of therapy after this. Which I'm pretty sure in Greedfall they call whisky.


	3. Leaving

_The days are burning like very thin candles._

Catasach didn’t hesitate to follow me, even though the city and the governor’s palace were so strange to him. I heard him muttering to himself in the islanders’ language as we hurried through Orsay Square to the grand staircase that led to the palace, and when I glanced at him, he was staring at the buildings and the few people that we passed who were out so late at night with a troubled expression. I thought his face looked pale under the pigments that he wore.

Our footsteps echoed in the quiet halls of the palace. A servant led us up to the third floor, far too slowly to my mind, but I had never been to Constantin’s rooms in the governor’s palace and didn’t know the way. I outpaced the man when we entered a small parlor and I heard Constantin’s voice coming from behind another door.

We came into the room to find Constantin much worse, curled in on himself as he sat in his chair. He was crying out with pain. There was a doctor with him, but if the crow had done anything at all for him, I couldn’t tell it. There was a smell in the room of dried herbs and sickness that took me back to the worst days of my mother’s illness, and I broke out in a cold sweat beneath all the layers of clothing and armor that I wore.

“You flutter in just when you’re needed, Cousin, as always,” Constantin said, panting.

Catasach looked to me, and I nodded toward Constantin. I couldn’t trust my voice.

Catasach went to my cousin and put a hand on his forehead, kneeling down before his chair. Constantin gasped at the touch. “Who—who are you? Your hand is cold as ice.” His eyes were cloudy white. Had the malichor taken his sight already? It had not been three weeks since we’d learned what his illness was.

“Your cousin is burning,” Catasach said, turning to me. The disease was burning through him so quickly.

Constantin leaned into the other man’s touch. “That is such a relief.” He whispered the words, closing his eyes.

Catasach’s calm demeanor helped me find my courage again, and I went to kneel beside him in front of Constantin. I touched my cousin’s hand, lightly, because I wasn’t sure how much it would pain him. “Let me present Catasach, Constantin.” My voice didn’t sound like my own, but I managed to get the words out. “He is the greatest healer on the island. He will help you.”

“Please,” Constantin whispered, “stay.”

“I am here for you, _renaigse_ , and I will not leave until I’ve found a way to ease your pain and suffering.” He reached up to touch Constantin’s face. “Fill your mind with the patience of the ocean.”

So close, I could see the veins of black blood beneath Constantin’s skin, which was rough and dry, his chapped lips, and the gray film that covered his blue irises. My throat closed, and my eyes stung. I stood and backed away from them before I lost what little control I still had over my emotions. I turned my face away, so they wouldn’t see when I wiped the tears from my cheeks.

“I know not how much time I will need,” Catasach continued. He turned to look at me. “I’ve never seen such a sickness.”

He stood, looking back down at Constantin. “The spirits of your land must be quite horrendous to cast down such evils upon the peoples that live there.”

Constantin was trembling with fatigue. “Thank you,” he managed in a dry husk of his voice. “I give you my last ounce of hope. Thank you, Cousin.”

I swallowed my fear for him, then asked Catasach, “What can we do for him now?”

“I have brought some remedies for his pain. I will try those to see which will bring sleep. Sleep is the great healer.”

Constantin still wore his coat and waistcoat, even his boots. He must have been working for most of the day; he had exhausted himself.

“You,” I said, turning to find the doctor, who was still in the room standing with his arms crossed over his chest beside Constantin’s writing desk on which he’d arranged his bottles of potions and pills. I imagined he felt offended that I’d brought a native healer into his domain, but I had no patience left for crows and their masks and their silence. “Go and find the governor’s valet. His Highness has need of him.”

The doctor gave me an abbreviated bow and left the room, all without saying a word.

I strode across the room and shoved all of his useless medicines to one side of the desk. “Here, Catasach. There is space for you to work.”

While Catasach took stone bowls, bundles of herbs, and small wooden boxes from the pack he had traveled with and a full water skin from the braided rope tie at his waist, I pulled off my gloves and went to kneel again at Constantin’s feet. His breath hissed out of him when I put my hand under his ankle and lifted his foot off the floor to pull off his boot.

“Let me help you, Constantin.”

He laughed breathlessly, and his voice was choked when he answered. “You’ve already worked another miracle, C-cousin. But I confess, I’m glad to have you here.”

“I won’t leave until we know if Catasach’s remedies will help.” I put the first boot down and started to pull the other off as gently as I could.

“Then I don’t know what to hope for.”

He said it so quietly that I thought I’d misheard at first, but the words cut me. He knew that I couldn’t stay. I busied myself by putting his boots to the side and starting to work on his gloves.

“Thank you, Cousin.”

I brushed my thumb over the knuckles of his hand that I’d just freed from its glove. “So gracious,” I said lightly. “You’re becoming a good patient, Constantin.”

Just then, the valet arrived, closing the door quietly behind him. I had pulled the second glove off and got to my feet at Constantin’s elbow. “Can you stand?” I asked him. “Lean on me.”

I didn’t know the name of Constantin’s new valet, but he seemed like a calm, efficient man. Perhaps not someone Constantin would enjoy, but I was glad that he did his work without fussing about a woman being in the room. Constantin, though, was a different matter. His valet and I had gotten his heavy embroidered coat off and the waistcoat beneath it, but when I started on the buttons of his linen shirt, he put his hand over mine to still my fingers.

“W-would you wait in the parlor, Cousin?” he asked. His hand shook on mine, his fingers jerking like someone else was pulling them on strings.

“You need help,” I replied.

“Please, Lily.”

He didn’t want me to see him without clothes, I realized, even though his valet could have dressed him in his sleeping gown and then helped him out of his breeches without revealing anything truly inappropriate. I had been dressing and undressing myself in our camps, surrounded by men and women both, for so long now that our old customs were beginning to seem foreign. But it wasn’t propriety that worried Constantin. And if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t sure I could see what the malichor was doing to him, not without making myself completely useless.

When I glanced at the valet, he put a hand under Constantin’s elbow and nodded in a way that was meant to be reassuring. “I’ll wait outside,” I said.

“I’ll find you as soon as we’re done, Your Excellency.”

When I turned back to close the door behind me, the valet had helped Constantin to lean against his bed. My cousin’s eyes stared in front of him and down a little; he couldn’t see me at all.

In the parlor, for the first time in weeks, I found myself alone and with nothing to do. 

The fire was burning low, and I stood in front of it feeling the warmth on my bare hands. I should have been too tired even to think, but with my body finally still, my thoughts took the opportunity to run. Torsten sat in the governor’s seat in San Matheus. When Vasco, Aphra, and I had returned from Hikmet, we had met Petrus back at the house. He had brought the Mother Cardinal to New Sérène to escape the coup, and she was sheltering in the Thélème embassy on Orsay Square. We might not have long before we would need to face the threat to our west, but in the meantime, I could hope that the remnants of the Ordo Luminis in the city would take care of that problem for us, or at least plague the traitorous commander enough to keep him occupied.

New guards in the uniform of the Congregation had been stationed outside the governor’s palace when I had gone to report events to Constantin. I had not been ready for degree of normality that I saw, as though the events of four days earlier had not happened. It was quiet. Servants went about their duties, measuring time in meals to be served, fires lit, and rooms freshened. The bodies had been taken away. Kurt’s body had been taken away. But there was a stain on the wooden floor where he had lain that hadn’t come away with scrubbing. I had glanced at it for only a moment before I turned my attention to Constantin, but I still saw the outline where his shoulders had been. There had been new boards stacked against the wall. One night between that visit and this one someone had torn up the boards that were stained with blood and replaced them, and tonight when I had passed through it had been like he’d never been there at all.

I didn’t even know where they had buried him—if they had buried him. And without anything to make his death seem real, part of me still expected to hear his voice again or see him waiting for me with sword in hand, first thing in the morning. These past few days I had sparred with Vasco or Siora, and at times, the echoes of Kurt’s voice in my thoughts had thrown me off my stride. At practice, I heard his voice the way I’d known it most of my life, gruff, stern, sometimes prodding at us dainty noble children, sometimes patient when we struggled with something new.

But at night when I was between waking and sleeping, I heard him the way he’d sounded the day he’d died as clearly as if he stood across from me again in that empty space. _I said draw!_ Or worse, _I am proud of you._

The door opened, startling me. “Your Excellency,” the valet said, and he held the door open for me.

Constantin was sitting up in bed. Catasach had given him one of the small stone bowls and was holding his hand steady to help him drink from it. “It is our waters from Wenshaganaw,” he said when I came to stand beside him, “with the berries we call _silín ei bán_ and a tea boiled many times from willow bark. The plants that grow in Wenshaganaw drink the water that flows from the mountain top. They are powerful medicine.”

We were both quiet, listening to him speak in his low rumble. Constantin finished the bowl in slow sips, and when Catasach took it from him and turned back to the desk, I leaned against the bed and rested my hand on his.

“Catasach was telling me what you did to bring him here,” he said, and I was relieved that he was speaking more easily now. He was lying back against the pillows his valet had piled up for him, and he had turned his head toward me, but too far, so he looked over my shoulder. “They’ll be telling stories about you across the island, Cousin.”

I almost laughed. Like as not they told many stories about me across the island, and whether I was the hero or the villain depended on who was doing the telling.

“She was very brave,” Catasach said, his back to us. His hands were busy crushing herbs that gave off a sharp smell of green things in one of the bowls. “As though she was fighting for her own.”

I looked at him, but he said nothing else. The islanders recognized me for an _on ol menawi_ , but whether they thought I was bonded to the land I’d come from or they guessed that I had been born on the island, I couldn’t tell. Siora hadn’t known before the admiral had revealed it to us. But Catasach…perhaps I could ask him about my mark and what it meant.

He turned and handed me a compress of crushed herbs wrapped in a loosely woven cloth. “Put it here,” he said, gesturing with two fingers toward my brow. “It will draw the heat out of him.”

When I turned to Constantin, he had fallen asleep. His face was drawn and gaunt. His cheekbones stood out beneath skin that was traced through with the black fingers of the malichor. Again I felt that I should be somewhere else, taking up the search for the _tierna harh cahdactas_ while there was still a little time, even while I dreaded leaving him. What if the next time I came back, it was to an empty chair, an empty room? A gravestone? I wasn’t breathing when I brushed his hair aside and laid the compress across his forehead.

“How do you make water hot?” Catasach asked. He had gone to the fireplace and was searching around the hearth.

“I’ll send for some.” He gave me a look, but he didn’t comment on the strangeness of bringing hot water from elsewhere when there was a fire right here in the room.

I returned from finding a servant in the hall to find Catasach sitting cross-legged on the rug in the center of the floor. When I asked if there was anything more I could help him with, he said, “No, _on ol menawi_. Rest. Sleep. Or there will be two of you sick.”

“You’ll need to sleep as well, Catasach. There’s bound to be an empty room on this hall; I could have someone make it ready for you.”

“I will sleep here,” he said, putting a hand flat on the rug. “We sleep next to the earth.”

I couldn’t argue with him, even though we were on the third floor. I unbuckled my cuirass and set it down as quietly as I could against one wall, laying my hat and gloves beside it, and then I moved the chair from Constantin’s desk to his bedside and sat to watch him sleeping.

The servant came and went, and Catasach moved between the door and the desk. But I hardly noticed until he held out a stone bowl in front of me that held wreaths of steam and the smell of flowers. “Drink,” he said.

It was a tea, like our chamomile but with a fragrance I’d never smelled before. I couldn’t compare it to anything I knew from the continent. I sipped and tried idly to decide if it was like apple or pear blossoms or nothing like them at all. At some point, Catasach must have taken the bowl from my hands, but the rest of my memories from that night were lost to sleep.

***

When I woke, gray light was coming in through the windows, and Constantin’s fingers were in my hair. The unexpected touch woke me, and it took me a moment to remember where I was—not under trees, sleeping by a dying fire, but in the palace—and who was with me. Constantin must have felt or heard me startle awake because he asked, his voice hushed, “Lily?”

I reached for his hand as I sat up and brushed my hair out of my eyes. I had slept in my coat and boots in the chair, my head pillowed on my arms on the edge of the bed, and now I felt like I was in knots all over. “I’m here. How are you feeling?”

“Less like death.”

“Do you need something? Some water?”

“No,” he said, and his hand closed on mine to keep me there when I half rose out of the chair. “Just stay. Listen.”

He stopped talking, and I did listen. Catasach was asleep on the rug, bare-headed, his back toward us. He looked somehow smaller without his headdress. His hair was nearly gray, and the branches—so I called them, because I didn’t know what name the islanders gave them—that crowned his head swept back from his temples, two on each side. Constantin’s valet had not yet appeared from where he slept in the dressing room off of the bedroom. If neither of us moved, the only sounds in the room were Catasach’s steady breathing and the muffled calls and clatter of merchants and builders already at work in Orsay Square.

Constantin was never awake this early, as far as I knew, before his valet had stirred or a servant had come to let in the daylight. I thought to prod him about how unfamiliar this quiet must be, but I didn’t want to be the one to break it. When the day really started, I would need to leave.

“I’ve been thinking about what the admiral told you,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear, after we’d been sitting together without saying a word long enough that the light had lost some of that gray quality of dawn.

“Does it bother you?” I asked, looking at him. He had turned his sightless eyes toward me. His expression was solemn, under the fatigue that one night’s rest hadn’t chased off.

“Not in that way. –I wouldn’t give you up even if you were the daughter of a bishop and a horse.” That made me grimace, which he couldn’t see, but one corner of his mouth still turned up in a smile, and he squeezed my hand.

“I used to envy you,” he continued. “My father was kind to you, as much as he was ever kind to anyone. For the obvious reason—you are so much more virtuous than I am. But I thought it was also because you weren’t in line for the throne. You didn’t have to suffer his expectations.”

He paused for a moment, and I thought he must have been remembering one of the many times my uncle had let him know he’d fallen short, but then he continued, “But what if he did—he does—have expectations for you?”

“—I don’t understand, Constantin.” But even as I said it, my mind had started down the trail he’d pointed me toward.

“My father ended the treaty with the Nauts that kept the island a secret twenty years ago, after he took you in,” he said. He took a too shallow breath, and I studied his face. He was in pain again and trying to hide it; he held his hand tense, as if to stop it trembling.

“Let me wake Catasach,” I said, but again he stopped me.

“No, not yet. Listen, Lily. –What if my father has always wanted you here? An islander child with a bond to this place, raised in the court of the Congregation and trained as a legate and a fighter—he wants to use you for his own purposes. And you can imagine what those are. He only wants peace if it serves him.”

“None of this matters to me right now.”

“But later it will matter,” he replied. “When you’re alone…you need to know what they want from you.”

He had accepted that he was going to die. The weight of the words, the inevitability of them, settled on me and stopped my breath. I wanted to argue. But for a moment after he’d spoken, I had to face the thought that he would die, leaving me with… I couldn’t think what I might do if Constantin was gone. We had always been in this together.

“I love you, you know.” He said it so quietly, and I thought my heart would be strangled in my chest.

“You are not saying goodbye to me, Constantin.”

I spoke more harshly than I’d meant to, and he breathed out in a shudder, letting go of my hand. “Don’t make me promises,” he said. He turned his face away from me, toward the window. His hands shook; he’d stopped hiding the tremors from me.

While I was casting about for something to say to bridge the silence, I looked across the room and found Catasach awake and watching me from where he sat on the floor. When I met his eyes, he stood and came to Constantin’s side, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder as he passed. Now I could hear sounds from the dressing room; the valet was awake and would be coming in at any a moment. Farther away, a door opened and closed. The little time we’d had between dawn and day was over.

Constantin said nothing when I stood and went to gather my things. By the time I’d settled my cuirass onto my shoulders, the valet had arrived to help me with the leather straps, and too quickly I was ready.

Constantin was handing an empty bowl back to Catasach. The valet left me and went to help my cousin swing his legs over the edge of the bed.

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Constantin, I’m leaving,” I said. I wanted to ask him, are you going to send me off like this?—but that was hardly fair. I was the one who was choosing to go.

For a moment he said nothing. His head was bowed and he gripped the edge of the bed. Catasach and the valet stood by, Catasach watching me, the valet careful not to. “Come here,” Constantin said finally. When I came close, his hand found my wrist, and he pulled me against his chest, wrapping his other arm around my shoulders. My free hand found the spot between his shoulder blades, but almost I pulled it away when I felt the knobs of his spine through the fabric of his sleeping gown. Almost. But I needed this too much. We hadn’t been this close since we’d landed on Teer Fradee. I rested my forehead on his shoulder and listened to him breathing and felt his hair soft against my cheek.

He moved first, straightening and setting me away from him. “Look out for yourself,” he said, the words he always sent me off with when I left, but this time his voice was hoarse.

I couldn’t speak at all. My fingers brushed his hand when he let me go, and then I fled for the door and all the tasks that waited for me. But when I turned to close the door behind me, Catasach was there. He followed me into the parlor.

“Catasach,” I started, meaning to ask him what he needed, but I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. To my horror, I was crying in front of him, wiping in vain at the tears as they fell. “I’m so sorry,” I gasped. I started to turn away from him to try to wrest back some control over myself, but he gathered me up in his arms.

“Forgive him his mood swings,” he rumbled. “He’s such a young boy, and he had so much desire to live.”

I pressed a fist against my mouth, trying at least not to cry aloud, and he made a noise low in his throat the way a mother might croon to comfort her child. “It is a hard thing to lose your _minundhanem_ ,” he said. It was a word that I didn’t know, but I didn’t have to understand it to understand his meaning. His hand was on the back of my head, and after the first shock of his touch, I found myself letting go by degrees until I was crying hot tears into his feathered tunic. “I will do all that I can to heal him,” he said.

“Take your courage in your hands, _on ol menawi_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anyone else starting to feel like we might be living in Serene? Obviously let's hope things don't get anywhere near that bad, but it's pretty eerie when art is echoing life like this.
> 
> Wherever you are, I hope you're safe and healthy and that you have enough toilet paper!
> 
> The next story is from Constantin's POV, and the first chapter should be up in a couple of weeks.


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